Professional graphics cards for performance workstations occupy a completely different market niche than the gaming solutions, even though they are manufactured by the same developers. Today we are going to check out the performance of these graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia in popular CAD/CAM systems for professionals. Especially since both manufacturers now have new card series on contemporary 55 nm chips: Quadro FX and FirePro.

Testing Participants Technical Specifications

Before we move over to performance of above discussed professional graphics accelerators, let’s sum up their technical specifications. It will help us interpret the obtained performance numbers better:

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Testbed and Methods

We tested professional graphics cards on a workstation built around the today’s fastest quad-core processor – Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition working at 3.33 GHz frequency. Also this workstation used a mainboard on Intel X58 Express and 6 GB of high-speed DDR3 SDRAM.

So, here is the list of hardware and software components used during this test session: